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4. This article is based on my ongoing research in Bangalore and the “global city” professional network, since 2006. Special thanks for support go to my colleagues in Bangalore, particularly Carol Upadhya, Leo Saldhana, Bhargavi Rao, Vinay Sreenavasa, A.R. Vasavi, Vinay Baindur, and Supriya Roychowdhury. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the SSRC conference on Inter-Asian Connections (Istanbul, 2013), with wonderful feedback from colleagues in the “Bringing Class Back In” workshop, especially Ching Kwan Lee and Cetin Celik. My sincere gratitude also goes to Vinay Gidwani, Michael Burawoy, Devika Narayan, ILWCH editors and readers, and especially Rachel Schurman for their careful reading and incisive advice. Finally, I would like to thank Jake Carlson, Vinay Baindur, and P. Rajan for their remarkable research support.

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26. Kundu, “Urban Systems in India.”

27. Breman, “India's Social Question in a State of Denial.”

28. Informality is not new, of course; scholars have documented how British law in India promoted and regulated informal labor practices in the 1800s. See Bhattacharya, S. and Lucassen, Jan, Workers in the Informal Sector: Studies in Labour History, 1800–2000, New York: MacMillan, 2005)Google Scholar and Parthasarathi, Prasannan, “Indian Labor History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 82 (2012): 127–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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51. Sabarinath, “US Private Equity Firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts to Invest Rs 750 Crore in 2 Realty Projects in Metros”.

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53. Chalapati Rao and Dhar, “India's FDI Inflows: Trends and Concepts.” Finance capital in India works in many ways: the stock market, where profits are made through financial transactions related to and influencing changing share prices; corporate decision making of shareholders (with concerns for the value of the share price in the short term) over managers (traditionally, with concerns for the success of the firm in the long term); firm liquidation or mergers and acquisitions as a strategy for driving up share price, even if it may lead to layoffs and factory closures; increasing role of private equity, sovereign wealth funds, hedge and derivative funds, whose primary concerns are short-term gain and liquidity; treating land as a financial tool, as seen in the phenomenal growth of the use of land for financial speculation in and around India's fast-growing cities; and the growing significance of finance within nonfinancial corporations for their profit and high share price.

54. World Investment Reports, 2012.

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69. Nair, The Promise of the Metropolis; Krishna and Pani, “Lessons from Dying Malls In India: A Study.”

70. Author's interview, Bangalore, 2011.

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78. Breman, “India's Social Question in a State of Denial.”

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80. For the BMIC project, 28,000 acres of land were required for a 7,000-acre road project, the rationale being that the road itself can never earn a profit, so the government must contribute three times the land so the road firm can build private townships in order to recover its losses for building the road. An estimated 200,000 rural denizens will be dispossessed once the road and townships are completed. (The private toll road runs alongside a recently upgraded public rail line and an already existing public highway.) My research focuses on these projects.

81. This area is the site for an ongoing, multiyear study on land conversion with colleagues from the University of Minnesota, NIAS-Bangalore, and ESG-Bangalore.

82. The notion of churning comes from Aseem Shrivastava and Kothari, Ashish's, Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India (New Dehli, 2012)Google Scholar but also gestures toward the process of flipping investments in land and infrastructure.

83. NDTV.com, Bangalore Crumbles as Civic Body Goes Bankrupt, 2014; Atul Chaturvedi et al., “Town Hall as Collateral,” Bangalore Mirror, January 3, 2014, http://www.bangaloremirror.com/bangalore/cover-story/Town-Hall-as-collateral/articleshow/28298364.cms? (accessed October 20, 2014).

84. One crore equals 10 million rupees, or in 2014, approximately US$610,000,000. Suhas Shankarappa, “The Changing Face (and Fortunes) of the Malleswaram Market,” Talk Magazine, July 18, 2013.

85. In large cities, city councilors are referred to as “corporators,” but this term can be confusing outside of the Indian context.

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88. At the time of the protests, some vendors said it was cheaper for them to buy from Foodworld than from the farmers.

89. Shankarappa, “The Changing Face (and Fortunes) of the Malleswaram Market.”

90. Benjamin, “Governance, Economic Settings and Poverty in Bangalore.”

91. Kalpana Gopalan, “Torn in Two: The Tale of Two Bangalores Competing Discourses of Globalization and Localization in India's Informational City,” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_=2349006 (accessed October 26, 2014).

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95. Ibid. Rich empirical work has been conducted on street hawkers and their displacement in Mumbai (Anjaria 2006), Kolkata, (Bandyopadhyay 2011), and New Delhi (Bhan 2009).

96. Although these real estate projects also happen on private lands, the examples and emphasis here is on public land conversion.

97. Roychowdhury, “Livelihood and Income: Informality and Poverty in Bangalore's Slums.”

98. It should be noted that elite neighborhoods are also built on illegally acquired land.

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